Wanted You More
by ThisBookBelongsTo
Summary: Based on a song of the same title by Lady Antebellum. Unintentionally multi-chapter, but please bear with me on this one! You all know how it ends, so please, hold out for the sunshine after the monsoon!
1. Chapter 1

**Based on the song by Lady Antebellum**

**If the genius of Conan Doyle's creations actually belonged to me, do you really think I would still be here, writing this –sans profit– online? I rest my case.**

**For SpookyZaragoza; as requested. Here's hoping you approve...**

John sat, motionless, in the armchair that had become his home these past weeks. Its cushions, a near-perfect cast of his languishing form, bore testament to his perpetual lethargy.

_I kept waiting on a reason, and a call never came_...

Every morning he rose a few minutes earlier, often beating the morning post to the front door. He would sit on the bottom step, staring intently at the painted brass letterbox. Dust motes settled on his glazed-over eyes, but he dared not blink to clear them. Any day now, John knew, there would be some sign or sound from him. Something – anything – to reassure his waiting friend, to simply...

John groaned as the deteriorating state of his joints made itself known, levering himself up from the cold step. Of course there had been nothing. It had been months, now. Months since he had watched, in abject horror, his friend's wiry frame tumbling down... down... into the white abyss from which he had never emerged, alive or... otherwise. John could not bring himself even to think of the alternative to Sherlock's survival; how could he go on, without him? It was the only way to retain even the lingering shreds of his sanity that still clung to the straggling remnants of his desperate mind.

He simply must have survived, somehow. There was no room anything else in John's heart but this certainty. He was alive... alive...

_No, I never saw it coming..._

But just as the inexorable tread of Time's weary soles had drawn the weeks into months, so too did those months become one year, and all too soon, two. John waned; there was no other word for it. His bright, azure eyes became sunken, their resemblance closer to a pair of uncut sapphires in the heather-grey coal seam than the dazzling gems that had danced upon his cheeks when Sherlock stood by his side. His rapier-sharp wit, once flashing and glancing off the highest of intellects, grew blunt in its neglect. Even John's faith in his absentee friend was running out, trickling away like the final grains in the organic, beating hourglass of his heart.

Could it be, that Sherlock was really... gone? John did not want to believe it, but the proof lay before his eyes as his gaze came to rest, as always, on the empty leather armchair where his friend had curled, like a bird of prey, ensconced in a haze of tobacco smoke and wild ideas, upon so many an evening just like this one. But... Sherlock had never... never... never let him down before. A single grain of hope teetered on the edge of the glass, oscillating on the brink of irreparable despair and desperate longing.

_Something in you must have changed..._

No, Sherlock had never let him down, before now. But now... Sherlock was gone. It tore at him inside to admit it, but the truth became more evident with every passing day that John passed alone. A recluse, a madman, a beggar in his own dreams...

Weeping and grasping for the insubstantial as he slept, curled in his sagging chair, John's soul breathed the sigh of a man defeated. Tears crawled in agonising tandem down his drawn countenance, finally falling to rest, unheeded by the sleeping shadow of a man as they stained his faded waistcoat with their saline trace... The final link in a two-year chain of suffering.

**Alright... Here's the first verse for you. What do you think? Feedback, as always, would be greatly appreciated. For those of you following 'Rules of Engagement' – fear not! All will be revealed in good time! Consider this a Victorian interlude in the 23****rd**** century drama, hm? Hope this meets with your approval, and look out for the next instalment – up soon!**


	2. Chapter 2

**Wanted You More**

**Chapter/Verse Two**

**Sherlock-centric**

**A/N: Obviously, I don't own any part of the Sherlock Holmes franchise. Sigh. The plot is mine, and the idea comes from SpookyZaragoza, to whom this fic. is dedicated. Thanks!**

Sherlock clutched his knees to his chest, shaking slightly as the weight of all that he had been forced to leave behind came crashing down about his shoulders. The delicate vapours, curling in electric tendrils around his buzzing neurones, were beginning to dissipate, and he felt as though his life really _had_ ended, all those months ago. How long was it now? He knew no dates, no time of day. All he knew was that it had been long enough that the particular cadences of his friend's voice were beginning to fade from memory, just like the drug. All his comforts, abandoning him at once. Tucked into an enrolled ball of grief, tiny droplets glinted as they rolled down his obsidian eyelashes and dropped into pools on the cold, unfeeling stone beneath him which he so envied, unheeded and as alone as their creator.

_All the words unspoken, promises broken..._

He had sworn to himself – to John – that he would not do anything... stupid. That was one of John's favourite words to describe his misadventures. Of course he saw the utter genius behind that eccentric exterior, the minute gears and wheels, computing, calculating... But he saw more. More than anyone ever had; even Mycroft. Even his only brother had never peered in close enough to see the aching, wretched heart, beating a slow and painful tune behind the ivory bars of its cage. Behind the lock to which only Sherlock had the key.

_I cried for so long..._

Only John had reached into the fleshy cavern and broken his self-made chains. Only his John... Sherlock had wept that day, for the first time in a great many years. A Sherlock boy did not cry. It was a motto carried with him since childhood, a stigma from which only one man had been able to free him. But at what cost! His friendship; gone. His heart; in pieces. His brilliant, agile mind; rusting and abused. Loathing, agony, a purgatory beyond any hell, tormented him day and night. How can you live with yourself, it probed, after what you did? The hissing of his conscience, reminding him – as if he could ever forget – what he had done to John.

_Wasted too much time, should've seen the signs..._

But he _had_ seen the signs. He had seen the friendship his roommate felt for him, had watched it grow. Had encouraged it, although he would not admit it to himself. He had revelled in it. Sherlock's keen wit and refined humour, tenderly coaxing his gentle friend into the light, stroking his very soul with emotions that wavered with neglect. It had been so long since he had felt, really _felt_, that his heart ached under the strain of it. But he persisted. He must, for John's sake.

In all that time, though, he had never succeeded. He had hoped, he could now confess - if only in the confines of his own yearning mind – to draw the opalesque, radiant love forth. To open John's heart, as he had done in kind. To repay a debt beyond measure. It was just the kind of impossible task which Sherlock so relished, and so absorbed had he become that he had not realised what was happening to them. To _them_. Until, as cliché dictates, it was taken away. Sherlock always professed to be at once amongst mortal men and above them, but even he could not rise above the crushing agonies of a broken heart.

_Now I know just what went wrong..._

As the water rushed in his ears, he knew. As he narrowly avoided death, he knew. As he crawled from the frothing shallows, he knew. Wiser men than he had taught of knowledge as power, and it was a doctrine into which the learned man had eagerly bought. A lifetime of observing, absorbing, resolving such _human_ problems had taught him that power, in its turn, carried the inevitability of responsibility. As the icy water lapped at his feet, as he huddled in a violently trembling mass of burgeoning hypothermia, every ounce of the responsibility for what he had done came crashing down on top of Sherlock. And he wept.

**Additional A/N: As anyone who has read any of my other work will know, I will always appreciate reviews, and I do **_**try**_** to reply to as many as possible. So please, drop me a line! A word, even! Let me know what you think. Thanks!**


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